Game Development Journey: from Unity Course Student to Releasing Alien Tap Attack

A definite highlight for us is when you folks share your creations with us! In this post Unity student and Co-Founder of Ghost Street Games, Dante Campana, walks us through his game development journey.

What’s your background?

I began dipping my toes into game development at roughly the age of 12. The first time I found the Warcraft III Map Editor program, I stayed up all night making my first tower defense game to play with my friends on Battle.Net.

By the time I was in high school, when I wasn’t playing Rockband or Crackdown, I found myself editing sprites for a small development team that, unfortunately, never released anything to the public. I put game development to the side for a period of time until I went to school for audio engineering which shifted my focus back towards game development and, more specifically, sound design and integration.

I spent my first year out of school as a contractor for a AAA game studio in the quality assurance department and the moment my contract ended I knew my next task had to be picking up Unity.

How did you end up on a Udemy course?

Having just finished a stint at a trade school and with the work experience I gained shortly after graduation, I knew that I really wanted to take my learning into my own hands. I had never taken a computer programming course in college or high school but programming always seemed to be something that could potentially be right in my wheelhouse.

I still had very good study habits from school and when I began researching online courses I found several avenues that seemed to perfectly align with my goals to fill the remaining gap in my skills. Ben’s Unity course very quickly grabbed a spot on my list of potential courses and ultimately was the path I decided to take.

How did you find the experience of the course?

The course gave me so much control over my education and I couldn’t be happier with it. Every lesson was concise and the cross-platform experience of Udemy made it easy for me to bring up the videos on my iPad, while doing the work along with it in Unity on my laptop. I could also access videos for review during down times at my day job. With resources such as ShareMyGame, the forums, the Udemy Q&A, and the blogs on GameDev.tv I felt like I was always able to find the answers for my questions and problems much easier than in the more traditionally structured courses I’ve taken in school.

How much time did you spend on the course?

Ben and his team are so easy to learn from and the courses are excellently paced so marathoning through a handful of lessons and then giving myself some free time to play around with the new concepts for the day and expand upon the sample projects was perfect for me. By the time I found my pace, I was spending 5-7 hours a day, 6 days a week working on the course work up until the first prototype for Alien Tap Attack came into fruition.

You can check out Dante’s game for free on iOS and Android. Share your thoughts over on their Facebook page or in the comments below, we’d love to hear them.